Thursday, January 7, 2010

Travis Goodspeed implemented a debugger for the CC2430 chips (which are being used for ZigBee/6LoWPAN)

Image Courtesy: Travis Goodspeed's Blog

"The protocol is blessedly simple and the 16 pages of documentation are quite complete when supplemented with the CC2430 datasheet. I hope that these notes might allow you to implement the protocol with less of a headache than I have."

Wellcore's personal monitoring system puts ZigBee and pattern recognition to work to help protect the elderly.

Wellcore customers can wear the waterproof monitor anywhere in the home (ZigBee communication—which is less powerful than WiFi but stronger than Bluetooth—works up to 170 feet through walls and up to 400 feet in open spaces), and continue to wear and use the system when they leave their house. Once outside, the Wellcore system will automatically switch to bluetooth communication with the wearer's cell phone (for now, only small set of cell-phones are supported).

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Freescale Semiconductor has unveiled the future of the smartbook category with a tablet reference design featuring a 7-inch touch screen with up to four times the viewing area of a typical smartphone and based on a form factor that is approximately one-third the size and volume of today’s typical netbook.

Freescale's smartbook tablet design in a range of colors (Photo Courtesy: Business Wire)

The solution is intended to enable a second generation of smartbook products with prices less than $200 and featuring form factors that fully leverage the power, performance and functionality advantages of advanced ARM® processor technology. It is designed to provide instant-on functionality, persistent connectivity and all-day battery life. The tablet will be demonstrated at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show running both the Android and Linux® operating systems.

The Freescale tablet includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth® wireless connectivity, and also features a 3D desktop framework with touch screen/QWERTY keyboard support. 3G modem and RF4CE protocol options are available. The tablet’s modular approach to 3G connectivity lets systems designers select carrier-specific air interfaces appropriate for different regions. Modules can be pre-certified by carriers and selected to match a range of features and performance targets. This method makes it easy to migrate quickly to new modem technologies as they are introduced.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Researchers at the University of Utah have developed a way to use wireless signals to detect movement through solid walls and doors.

Photo Courtesy: Gizmodo

The technique, called variance-based radio tomographic imaging, processes signals from a 34-node IEEE 802.15.4 wireless network. It's the protocol for personal area networks used by home automation systems such as ZigBee

IEEE GLOBECOM 2010 is the flagship conference of IEEE Communications Society, which is to be held in Miami during 6 - 10 December 2010. We invite you to submit your original technical papers and tutorial and workshop proposals to this event.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Libelium has released a new application to send data collected by its sensor network to Twitter and Wordpress. The final idea is to make things and the environment “talk” and have its own space in the web updated in real time.

A forest or city with its own blog updated by itself?, a house which can twitter in real time? Yes! it is possible, and it is open source. The application works with the Waspmote sensor platform collecting the information and the Meshlium router as a bridge between the 802.15.4/ZigBee network and the Internet.

There are many protocols available for enabling wireless communication in a network of smart objects. Zigbee (http://www.zigbee.org) is a low-cost and low-power radio communications protocol based on the 802.15.4 standard for Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs). 6LowPAN (http://www.6lowpan.org/) also uses the 802.15.4 standard but uses IP with the aim of achieving the wireless ‘Internet of Things’. 6LoWPAN stands for IP version 6 (IPv6) over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks. The IPSO Alliance (http://www.ipso-alliance.org) promotes this use of IP for smart objects and, indeed, there are many good arguments for using the existing IP protocol.

IP is an well-established open standard and is media independent which means it can run over low-powered radios such as 802.11 WiFi, long range 3G (Third Generation) telephony as well as ethernet among others. Best effort or reliable transmission is available using UDP (User Datagram Protocol) or TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) respectively. Recent implementations such as uIP have shown that IP is a lightweight protocol and its versatility means it supports any type of application and in turn is supported by a diverse range of devices from high-end servers to smart phones. This versatility has led to IP’s ubiquity and over its comparatively long life its has showm itself to be stable (after all, it is used for the Internet), manageable (using protocols such as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocols – DHCP, Domain Name System – DNS and Simple Network Management Protocol – SNMP) and provides end-to-end communication.

TinyOS (http://www.tinyos.net/) is the original and probably best well known operating system (OS) for the sensor nodes that make up Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Sun Microsystems has also developed Java based sensors using the Squawk Virtual Machine (See https://spots.dev.java.net/). However, there is another operating system that we must consider not only for WSNs but also for embedded devices generally and what is sometimes referred to as ‘The Internet of Things’.

The Contiki Operating System (http://www.sics.se/contiki) is an open source multitasking operating system for memory-constrained networked embedded devices and wireless sensor nodes. It is a well established OS. Version 1.0 was released in March 2003. The latest edition, Version 2.3, was released in June 2009. It is free to download under BSD license. It was developed jointly by several research and commercial organisations including the Swedish Institute for Computer Science (SICS), the Technical University of Munich, SAP, Cisco and the semiconductor manufacturer ATMEL.

Contiki has been ported to many of the vast range of sensor products available including Crossbow’s TelosB and MICAZ sensor motes as well as this vendor’s Environmental Sensor Bus (ESB) (See http://www.xbow.com). Atmel’s AVR Raven sensors (See http://www.atmel.com) and Sentilla’s JCreate prototyping platform (http://www.sentilla.com/) are also supported.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Google has joined the IPSO Alliance, a consortium of technology vendors promoting the use of the Internet Protocol for "smart object communications," once referred to as "the Internet of things." The vision of this group is that everything from appliances to cars are plugged into an IP network and can communicate via private networks or over the Internet.

As you might expect, the year-old group is also a cheerleader for IPv6 adoption. Should every object that consumes power also be equipped with its own IP address, we are going to need more of those puppies.

In addition to Google, Fujitsu also joined IPSO. The IPSO alliance now boasts 53 members including Bosch, Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, SAP, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments and now Google and Fujitsu.

San Jose, CA, December 16, 2009 – Atmel® Corporation (NASDAQ: ATML), a leader in touch- and microcontroller-based solutions, today announced it is collaborating with H&D Wireless to deliver an IEEE802.11b+g Wi-Fi solution for Atmel's 32-bit AVR® microcontrollers. In this collaboration, H&D Wireless will provide the SPB104 Wi-Fi extension board which is easily connected to the AVR32 UC3 evaluation kits through the SD card socket. This collaboration results in the industry’s most power efficient Wi-Fi solution, with an overall power consumption five times lower than any other similar solution on the market.